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The American Prospect - articles by authorenBecoming Obamahttp://prospect.org/article/becoming-obama-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400043603?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=theamerpros-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1400043603">The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama</a></i> by David Remnick Alfred A. Knopf, 672 pages, $29.95 </p>
<p>Many books have already been written about Barack Obama -- the two most successful of them so far by Obama himself -- and many more books will be written about him during and after his presidency. But for the moment, the most thorough account of Obama's life to date is David Remnick's deeply researched and eloquently written biography. Remnick does not substantially challenge the story that Obama himself has presented, but he goes well beyond <i>Dreams from My Father</i> and <i>The Audacity of Hope</i> and presents a deeper and more complicated story. It does little to tarnish Obama's image but differs at times from his own accounts. </p>
<p>Remnick's purpose here is not just to present the story of Obama's unusual and very interesting life. It is also to trace the extraordinary path of the first African American to enter the White House. The title of the book, <i>The Bridge</i>, is drawn from a statement by civil-rights-movement veteran John Lewis, now a member of Congress, who said during the 2009 inauguration that "Barack Obama is what comes at the end of the bridge in Selma." In making race such an important part of the story, Remnick rejects, without saying so, the attractive but false idea of a post-racial America. Instead, he treats race as a central part of Obama's rise to power -- both as an obstacle and as an advantage but never far from the center of his election as president. </p>
<p>Accounts of Obama's life are familiar to most Americans, but those accounts differ radically depending on how people have received their information and, perhaps more important, on what their preferences and prejudices may be. His admirers see in his life a courageous and even extraordinary path to adulthood that shaped him into an inspirational leader. His critics see other, sometimes fantastical stories -- that he was not born in the United States and is thus not eligible to be president, that he has concealed a conversion to Islam, that he is a secret (or not so secret) socialist who "pals around with terrorists," and that he is, of course, an African American, sparking the deep remaining prejudices of many white Americans. </p>
<p> Almost everyone knows that Obama grew up without a father. Many may not know that he grew up mostly motherless as well. Obama's mother spent much of her adult life in Indonesia, and Barack -- beginning at age 6 -- spent four years there before returning to Hawaii alone. He never lived with his mother again for any significant length of time and was, instead, raised by his white maternal grandparents in Hawaii. He attended the elite Punahou School, then went to Occidental College in Southern California. Looking for a less cosseted place, he transferred to Columbia University and graduated after two years there. He then worked for several years as a community organizer in New York and Chicago. His time at Harvard Law School, where he was among the older and more experienced law students, was pivotal for him. Relatively obscure at Columbia, he found himself a favorite of the faculty and among the most intelligent, talented, and respected members of his law school class. His election as president of the <i>Harvard Law Review</i> was a landmark of his career -- providing him national attention as the first African American to serve in that position. But at the same time that Obama was making a mark in the mostly white world of Harvard and the legal establishment, he was slowly finding his way into the African American community. Through much of his young life, he had paid little attention to race -- a result in part of his living in the aberrantly multicultural state of Hawaii, one of the few places in America where race is not a major part of the culture. But after he moved to the East Coast, he combined his cosmopolitan identity with an African American identity. He moved back and forth across these complementary (and sometimes conflicting) identities throughout his pre-presidential life. </p>
<p>Obama's early political career was rooted in the culture of community organizing, a frequent path to politics, especially for urban African Americans. But his political life was also rooted in the fractious, clubby world of the Chicago Democratic machine. He was not, at first, a natural politician. He won his first campaign -- for a seat in the Illinois Legislature -- only by disqualifying the incumbent after successfully challenging the petitions necessary for her inclusion on the ballot. A few years later, he ran a disastrous race against Bobby Rush, an entrenched incumbent African American congressman -- a race that almost everyone had warned him he could not win. He was an intelligent speaker but not yet an inspiring one; he seemed to many people -- black and white -- to sound like the law professor he was for a time. He was under tremendous pressure from the black political community in Chicago to "wait his turn," and he was under pressure as well from his wife to stabilize their family (and its finances -- a problem, eventually solved by the sensational success of his books). But however clumsy his early political life may have been, it was by now so important to him that he could not give it up. </p>
<p>Obama was a product of a new, post-movement generation of African Americans, highly educated, at home in the white world. But in much of the black political world, he was met with some skepticism, at least at first. Many African American politicians, bred in the years of protest and grievance, found Obama too aloof, too conciliatory, too much an intellectual. They admired him from a distance but were uncomfortable with him up close. </p>
<p>When a vacant Senate seat suddenly opened in 2004, Obama became an almost prohibitive front-runner in the race -- in part because two of his most formidable opponents were knocked out early because of sexual scandals. But his rapid rise was not just a result of his opponents' misfortunes. It was also a product of his growing political talent -- a new eloquence that came from his hard-won ability to combine the energy of traditional black oratory with his capacity to reach across divisions and raise the hopes of those who yearned for someone who could conciliate the fractiousness of American (and eventually global) politics. </p>
<p>Obama's greatest breakthrough -- without which he would likely not have become president -- was largely a result of luck. Illinois colleagues persuaded John Kerry to choose Obama as the keynote speaker at the 2004 convention. His sensational speech in Boston made him, as Remnick notes, "a political phenomenon" overnight -- an obscure state senator who suddenly became one of the most famous and revered figures in America. His speech combined his newfound oratorical power with a conciliatory message. ("There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and white America and a Latino America and Asian America; there is the United States of America.") There was still a long way to go before he would become an entirely credible presidential candidate, but from the moment of his convention speech he became -- in the minds of many Americans, both black and white -- the first African American with a realistic chance of becoming president. </p>
<p></p><center>***</center>
<p>Remnick's account of Obama's rapid march from state senator to United States senator to president is already familiar to most followers of recent politics. But in these last chapters, as in the earlier ones, Remnick gives particular attention to the role of race in Obama's ascent. His sudden fame did not lead all African Americans to hope for his election. Many feared that he would be assassinated, and others feared that he would lose and destroy the chances of future African Americans to become president for decades. But Obama was now no longer an outsider in the black community. He was its shining example. His shrewd and effective efforts to keep himself highly visible after his election to the Senate helped draw overwhelming support from African Americans. But his success in attracting white people was perhaps even more extraordinary. Some were drawn to him because the idea of the first black president was so attractive, but many others were drawn to his impressive demeanor despite race and because of his conciliatory and tolerant tone (a welcome alternative to the deeply unpopular Bush presidency) but also by his own attractiveness. </p>
<p>Remnick's account of Obama's presidential campaign focuses largely on the role of race, and he provides important cameos of some of its most important moments -- notably the Jeremiah Wright controversy (which Obama transcended as a result of an extraordinary speech). But the campaign story is generally familiar, and Remnick understandably provides a kind of summary of a story that will still be well known among most readers. He closes his book with a brief summary of Obama's first year in office. Like most of the president's hopeful admirers, he reflects the disappointment that many felt as his inspirational campaign turned into a drab and intractable set of problems and challenges -- culminating in the apparent failure of health care after the defeat in Massachusetts of the 60th Democratic vote in the United States Senate. </p>
<p>But by the time of this book's publication, many readers may feel differently. Obama came to the presidency determined to govern with calm reason, conciliation, and a willingness to compromise. Instead he was confronted with implacable -- and at times almost hysterical -- partisan opposition and a purposeful mobilization of demagogic reaction (laced, it seems clear, with a large amount of racial anxiety). For a time, Obama's calm and seemingly passive style of leadership served him -- and the country -- poorly. But in the aftermath of the January defeat in Massachusetts, he seemed to revive and began to lead his party with passion and tenacity, finally winning passage of the most important social program since the 1960s -- and perhaps since 1935. Republicans, despite their failure to block the bill, have insisted that the unpopularity of the legislation will demolish the Democratic majorities and permanently weaken Obama's presidency. But no one should underestimate Obama's determination and political skill. Seven months is a long time in electoral politics, and the Democrats -- if they are able to mobilize an effective defense of what is actually a very successful first 14 months -- may well do much better than many people now imagine in 2010. </p>
</div></div></div>Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:22:04 +0000148607 at http://prospect.orgAlan BrinkleyWhat's Next?http://prospect.org/article/whats-next-0
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p>This time there are no excuses -- no thwarted popular majority, no fatal butterfly ballots or hanging chads, no renegade Supreme Court decision, no Nader factor. This was a defeat, pure and simple -- not a landslide, not an unambiguous mandate for the policies of the Bush administration, but unmistakably a defeat. So where do Democrats, and liberal-progressive Democrats in particular, go from here?</p>
<p>It will be tempting, as it always is, to blame the candidate and the campaign. John Kerry was never anyone's idea of a perfect candidate. Yet he helped unite Democrats in a way they have not been united in a generation, raised more money than any Democrat has ever raised, campaigned with extraordinary energy and commitment, bested the president in three debates, attacked the policies of the administration sharply and forthrightly, mobilized the party's base successfully, and received 4 million more votes than Al Gore did in 2000. Perhaps a candidate with greater political skills might have done better, but no such candidate was clearly visible in this race. Democrats would be making a serious mistake if they concluded that their only problem, or even their principal problem, was their choice of a candidate.</p>
<p>And in any event, the presidency is not the most difficult challenge. True, Republicans have won five of the last seven presidential elections. But think how little it would have taken for that figure to be three out of seven (if Gore had won in 2000 -- as many believe he actually did -- and had won re-election in 2004 with the same post–September 11 strength from which George W. Bush profited). The average popular vote of the seven winners since 1980 -- even including Ronald Reagan's 59-percent landslide in 1984 -- is a little more than 50 percent. A few hundred thousand votes difference in Ohio this year would have given Kerry a victory (albeit one in which he, like Bush in 2000, would have lost the popular vote). So it's not hard to imagine centrist Democrats winning presidential elections in the future, even in four years, if the Republicans are unsuccessful or unlucky or both. </p>
<p>The greater challenge is to reverse the erosion of Democratic strength in Congress. This will be particularly difficult in the Senate. More than half the states are securely Republican, many of them small in population, collectively without enough electoral votes to produce a Republican presidential victory but all of them, of course, with two Senate seats. Democrats do control some Senate seats in the red states, just as Republicans control some in the blue ones. But Republicans have steadily increased their control over southern and western Senate seats, leaving the Democrats with a substantial structural disadvantage. Republican control of so many states also means that when congressional districts are reconfigured, Democrats will find themselves further disadvantaged -- as they were this year in Texas after the Tom DeLay–driven, off-cycle reapportionment. If the most Democrats can hope for is an occasional Democratic president facing a consistently conservative Republican Congress, the future of progressive or liberal hopes is grim, indeed.</p>
<p>The most sobering fact about the 2004 election is that Democrats did not profit from the significant rise in voter turnout. It has long been an article of faith among Democrats that increasing the turnout would help their candidate. But that was not the case this year. Bush drew 9 million more voters than he received in 2000, an 18-percent increase, far overshadowing Kerry's 8-percent increase over Gore. That same increase in Republican turnout contributed to the party's larger-than-expected gains in Congress. Even among first-time voters, expected to be a major source of Democratic strength, Kerry won only a modest majority. It's hard to imagine voter turnout growing much above the 59 percent we saw this year. Mobilizing the base did not produce victory. So for Democrats, the only real option now is to expand their base, in part by converting Republican voters into Democratic ones.</p>
<p>This is precisely the reverse of the task the right faced in 1964, in the aftermath of Barry Goldwater's overwhelming defeat and the rout of Republicans in Congress. For the Democrats to rebuild as the Republicans once did will require the same things that helped launch the rise of the right 40 years ago: commitment, imagination, hard work, and confidence in the importance of their task. Progressive forces have much less ground to make up than conservatives did when they began. But they cannot expect to make up that ground simply by waiting for the Republicans to fail, or for demographic trends to change the electorate in their favor, or for a charismatic candidate to emerge. They should, rather, try to emulate, at least in some ways, the great success of the right in turning itself from a frail “remnant” (as some conservatives liked to call themselves in the 1950s) into a mighty force that now dominates American politics.</p>
<p><b>BUILD AN INFRASTRUCTURE</b><br /><br />
The rise of the right began not so much with ideas or candidates or popular support as with infrastructure. Within months of the 1964 election, work was already under way. Richard Viguerie began constructing a vast mailing list of conservative donors from a list of 12,000 Goldwater contributors and expanded from there to more than 4 million contributors and 15 million names by the mid-1970s. Conservative campaigns had for many years been less well-funded and less well-organized than those of their rivals. In most recent elections, they have been better funded and better organized. </p>
<p>The right has constructed an intellectual infrastructure as well. It has created think tanks -- The Heritage Foundation; the Hoover Institution; the Cato, Hudson, Manhattan, and American Enterprise institutes; and many others -- that over time became well-endowed with money, strategies, and tactics for the war of ideas. The Federalist Society has spent years grooming aspiring lawyers to become judges. Conservatives have created their own media -- not just the small political magazines that both the left and the right have had for years but talk radio and FOX News and the large networks of evangelical cable and radio stations. The right has produced a stable of conservative journalists and pundits, who increasingly dominate political talk shows. This infrastructure operates with remarkable coordination and discipline. Those who have attended Grover Norquist's weekly breakfasts, which fill a large hotel ballroom in Washington, have been struck by how effective the meetings are in shaping a message that many very different groups then consistently deliver.</p>
<p>That infrastructure has now spread into Congress. Beginning in 1993, congressional Republicans became united in their effort to ensure the failure of the Clinton presidency. There was not a single Republican vote for Bill Clinton's tax increase that year. The filibuster, a tactic party leaders had seldom used in the past, became a routine tool of derailing any legislation Republicans did not like. The impeachment drive in 1998–99 was almost wholly partisan. Virtually no Democrats supported it. Republicans have abandoned bipartisanship as either a goal or a value. This exceptional party unity has essentially removed the Senate and the House as the checks and balances the Constitution envisioned -- except to the degree that the Democratic minority can at times derail conservative efforts. Years of Republican judicial appointments have made a large proportion of the federal judiciary reliable partners of the right as well.</p>
<p>And conservatives have been astoundingly effective in recent years in the mechanics of turning out their voters. They have mobilized churches and community centers and retirement homes and other institutions through which friends and neighbors bring other friends and neighbors to the polls -- as opposed to, say, anonymous college students calling Democratic voters and offering them a ride. Democrats bring voters to the polls by the carful, Republicans by the busload.</p>
<p>Progressives used to have an infrastructure, too: urban machines, labor unions, networks of intellectuals and university professors who provided a reliable source of ideas. But urban machines have disappeared, labor unions have declined, and the number of professors and intellectuals available for political duty has dwindled. </p>
<p>Liberals need to build a new infrastructure. They have already made a start. This magazine, founded 15 years ago to bring the world of ideas into progressive public discourse in much the same way that <i>The Public Interest</i> had done for the right, is one example of that effort. There are new progressive think tanks (John Podesta's Center for American Progress, for example) and older progressive foundations that have become more energized (such as The Century Foundation, whose board, I should disclose, I chair). Political organizations committed to Democratic and progressive goals have become significant forces in campaigns and elsewhere: MoveOn.org, which helped mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to increase turnout on election day; NARAL Pro-Choice America, which has helped make women's choice a winning issue in much of the country; the American Constitution Society, formed to offer an alternative to the Federalist Society; and others. Democrats, largely thanks to Howard Dean, learned to use the Internet earlier and more effectively than the Republicans. And Air America has begun to offer a challenge to right-wing radio. </p>
<p>But progressives still have a long way to go to catch up in the number, size, and resources of their institutions. Building such institutions is an essential part of the task of revival. Without them, the Democrats will remain at a significant disadvantage.</p>
<p><b>RECONNECT WITH WORKING PEOPLE</b><br /><br />
The greatest success of the modern right has been transforming conservatism into a populist phenomenon, drawing heavily from the lower middle class, the working class, and, perhaps above all, the once-Democratic South. The greatest dilemma Democrats face is how to win a significant number of those voters back. To do so, Democrats need to turn much of their attention away from culture and back toward class. </p>
<p>That was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's triumphant strategy in the 1930s, much aided, of course, by the Great Depression. In the 1920s, the Democratic Party had torn itself apart debating cultural issues that divided its diverse constituencies. Battles over prohibition, immigration, the Ku Klux Klan, and other explosive questions paralyzed the party (producing the famous deadlock at the 1924 Democratic convention, in which it took 103 ballots to produce a candidate with no hope of winning). But even before the Depression began, Roosevelt was thinking about how to escape these divisive issues and turn the party to questions that would cross regional and cultural boundaries. Roosevelt won two landslide victories -- with huge Democratic majorities in Congress -- by talking not about culture but about class. The New Deal coalition was united by shared economic interests, shared suspicion of corporate power, and shared commitment to aggressive government efforts to improve the lives of ordinary people. At times, Roosevelt used a language of class conflict in a manner almost without precedent in the history of the presidency. “We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed,” he said in his 1936 State of the Union address. “They seek the restoration of their selfish power. … Give them their way and they will take the course of every autocracy of the past -- power for themselves, enslavement for the public.” </p>
<p>No one should wish for today's Democratic Party to adopt such language or to portray itself as the adversary of the corporate world. Nor should anyone wish for a government that ignores racial justice, as the New Deal did. That would be both bad politics and bad policy, as it was to some degree even for Roosevelt. But Democrats today need to have a clear economic message to reach those who were known in the 1930s as “the common man.” Bill Clinton was most successful when he was identifying with the plight of lower-middle-class and working-class people caught in a painful economic transition. John Kerry, perhaps less credibly, tried to use those issues as well, as did Al Gore in 2000. That both men failed to win does not discredit the value of the effort; if anything, it suggests that the efforts have not been strenuous enough. </p>
<p>It will not be easy to wean working-class Republicans from the cultural resentments that have displaced their economic resentments -- nor, for that matter, to wean some Democrats themselves from their preoccupation with culture wars and identity politics. Both parties have been complicit in ignoring and obscuring the terrible impact on the social fabric of the growing inequality of the last 30 years. Both have paid too little attention to the erosion of the many protections that once provided a level of security for working people. The right has done so by choice, the left by inadvertence. But the past notwithstanding, there is an opportunity for Democrats and progressives to revive such issues as health care, the minimum wage, corporate malfeasance, workers' rights and workers' safety, and other areas of economic security more emphatically and successfully than they have done in recent years. </p>
<p><b>COME TO TERMS WITH “MORAL VALUES” AND RELIGIOUS FAITH</b><br /><br />
Re-engaging with issues of class and power is a risky strategy. It's certain to evoke accusations of “class warfare” and “demagoguery” from the right, and from some centrist Democrats. It's also unlikely by itself to reverse the party's fortunes unless progressives can come to terms with cultural issues. </p>
<p>How should progressives respond when they discover that many, perhaps most, Americans strongly oppose some of the values in which they deeply believe? How should they answer those, even within their own ranks, who claim that it is a grave political error to support the rights of gays and lesbians, protect women's access to legal abortion, believe in the immorality of the death penalty, oppose the unregulated sale of weapons, resist the intrusion of religion into politics and government, and defend affirmative action? There may be room for pragmatic compromise on some of these issues, but only up to a point. To jettison deep commitments for political advantage is an unworthy way to gain office. The Democratic Party paid a huge political price in the 1960s and '70s for supporting the civil-rights movement, a price it is still paying. But no one, I hope, would argue that Democrats should not have done so. </p>
<p>I would like to think, however, that the power of “moral values” is not permanently wedded to a single set of issues and prejudices; that it is, rather, closely connected with a perception of principled conviction and commitment. President Bush gained many votes on the margins from outlawing late-term abortions, lobbying for a constitutional prohibition against gay marriage, and calling for “faith-based initiatives.” But I suspect he gained many more votes by conveying an image of certitude and self-assurance rooted in moral and spiritual values. Kerry recognized this as a problem for Democrats early in his campaign and began talking extensively, if not often convincingly, about “values.” His mistake was not in raising the issue but in failing to define his own relationship to it. Indeed, one of his greatest weaknesses in the campaign was his image as a man without deep conviction, a “flip-flopper.” This hurt him not only among people who said they cared about “moral values” but among those who were principally concerned with fighting terrorism, who also voted overwhelmingly for Bush. Kerry and the Democrats seemed to such voters to lack the courage and moral fiber desired in a leader.</p>
<p>Many have argued that Bush's advantage on this issue can be explained in large part by his open identification with Christian faith. More than any previous president, Bush has been exceedingly open about his religiosity and has shown no reluctance to invoke his own evangelical beliefs, and his claim of a personal rebirth in faith, in explaining himself to the nation. Kerry is an active Catholic who reportedly wears a crucifix and regularly attends Mass, but he lost the Catholic vote and seemed to many Americans to be without religious affiliation of any kind. </p>
<p>Twenty-three percent of voters this year identified themselves as white evangelical or born-again Christians. Seventy-eight percent of those voted for Bush. White evangelicals have been voting Republican for years. Nevertheless, many progressives have been especially alarmed by the growing size and activism of this group in the electorate, and by what they fear is the close-minded anti-intellectualism it represents. It is not comforting to think of voters making decisions in response to what they consider commands from the Bible or direct instructions from God, and it is undoubtedly the case that a significant group of Christians does just that. But most evangelicals are not so dogmatic. They find in their faith not just a set of beliefs but a source of personal stability and safety. Their attraction to Bush is, I suspect, as much a result of his image of certitude as it is of his religious beliefs.</p>
<p>Whatever role religion may have played in the 2004 religion, there is no compelling reason to believe that deep and public faith is a necessary ingredient of political success. Reagan's enormous, if erratic, popularity owed little to his faint public religiosity and much to the widespread belief that he was a strong, principled leader with deep convictions. FDR, as beloved and admired a president among ordinary Americans as we have had in our history, won the loyalty of his following with an image of strength and commitment largely unconnected to faith. The claim that Democrats cannot hope to revive without identifying more closely with Christianity is not supported even by our relatively recent history. There are important moral values that exist independent of religion; sources of commitment other than spiritual; personal strength not derived from faith. </p>
<p>But this does not mean that progressives should shun religion, either. Just as there are sources of conservative conviction in religion, so are there sources of progressive commitment to helping the poor, protecting the earth, working for peace. There is no reason not to recognize and respect them. Nor should progressive politicians who have a grounding in faith hide it from voters. The separation of church and state is a profoundly important principle of American government, a principle that the Bush administration has often sought to undermine. But protecting that separation does not require that religion be hidden from view and banished from public discourse. Least of all does it suggest that progressives should look with fear, mistrust, or scorn on the millions of Americans to whom religious faith is a fundamental part of self-identification. Clinton was entirely comfortable in religious settings -- not just black churches, where he was famously beloved, but also in the enormous white Pentecostal churches of the South, where he was a frequent visitor. It would be hard to imagine Kerry fitting comfortably into such settings, but that does not mean future candidates could not do better.</p>
<p><b>MAKE PEACE WITH THE MILITARY -- AND THE SOUTH</b><br /><br />
To many Americans, and to even more people around the world, the most dangerous and frightening aspect of the Bush administration has been its handling of the nation's response to terrorism and its international relations more generally. The abrogation of international agreements, the contempt for international organizations, and the brusque dismissal of allies all preceded September 11. We now know that plans for an invasion of Iraq did as well. The war on terrorism has been handled with a striking incompetence that has alarmed no one more than those most deeply committed to it. The war in Iraq, reviled by many Americans and most of the world even before it began, has proceeded with, if anything, even greater incompetence than the war on terrorism. Of all the areas in which Bush seemed most vulnerable, this surely was one of the greatest. Of all the issues that led progressives to wonder how Bush could possibly win, this was probably the most powerful. </p>
<p>Kerry's response to Bush on issues of foreign policy was sensible and, to most progressives, reasonably persuasive. Americans were misled into the war in Iraq. The war is a disastrous stalemate. Our alliances are in tatters. And the war on terrorism remains largely unfought. A Democratic administration would work to disengage responsibly from Iraq, re-engage allies, and fight the war on terrorism in a more serious way. Why did this argument have so little traction with voters? </p>
<p>The Bush administration was perhaps more clever than we realized. A fight against terrorist groups -- a difficult, shadowy, complicated effort with few assurances of success -- would have no public face capable of providing a political advantage. Overthrowing a state is something the U.S. military knows how to do and something that fits more comfortably in most people's image of war. The war in Iraq has not proceeded well, to put it mildly; but it nevertheless gave some credibility to the administration's effort to portray itself as having the strength and resolve necessary for leadership in a dangerous world. Bush's flyboy appearance on the deck of an aircraft carrier to celebrate a “mission accomplished” was widely and justly ridiculed, but the image of a virile warrior in the end probably outweighed the irony of his false claims of success.</p>
<p>Not since John F. Kennedy have the Democrats been able to produce a plausible military leader. Jimmy Carter was a graduate of the Naval Academy, but he appeared hapless and ineffectual when confronted with a military challenge (most notably through the failed helicopter raid to rescue the Iranian hostages in 1980). Clinton waged a series of successful military campaigns without ever overcoming the image pinned on him in 1992 as a draft evader. Gore and Kerry, both Vietnam veterans, failed to compete as military leaders with a man who had chosen not to serve in Vietnam and had not even fulfilled his minimal obligations as a specially privileged member of the Texas National Guard. It is ironic, perhaps, that the most plausible military leader of the two decades before Bush's presidency was Reagan, who also missed his generation's war but who knew how to act like a man who understood battle.</p>
<p>Unspoken but clearly felt in the comparisons between Democrats and Republicans in recent decades has been a particular conception of masculinity and patriotism. Kerry's impressive war record wilted quickly in the face of withering attacks from the Swift-boat avengers, but also in the face of the self-confident, masculine swagger that seems to be a natural part of the president's demeanor. Clearing brush in Crawford beats windsurfing in Nantucket any day. A key to Bush's victory is that he outpolled Kerry by 11 percent among men (and by a higher percentage than that among white men), while losing by a small margin among women. </p>
<p>Democrats have also had difficulty identifying with patriotism. Despite decades of efforts to flood the party's conventions with flags and patriotic music, Democrats are still associated in many minds with the anti-war movement and the other protests of the 1960s, and of course they now lead the anti-war movement of the early 21st century. Progressives rightly argue that opposing a mistaken and disastrous war is itself a patriotic act. But they must find a better way to have both a responsible foreign and military policy and a comfortable relationship with military culture and national pride.</p>
<p>This is a particular problem in the region with which Democrats most urgently need to reconnect: the American South. It is the area of the United States in which the military is most visible and revered; in which the culture of masculinity is perhaps the strongest; in which a nationalistic patriotism is especially powerful. Bush has a terrible record of support for U.S. military forces, but he is wholly at ease on military bases -- just as he is at ease at NASCAR races, football games, and other masculine activities. Democrats need to find a way to reconnect with that world, not by catering to its prejudices but by learning to respect its public culture and to demonstrate comfort with it.</p>
<p>The rebuilding of the Democratic Party, and of a progressive coalition capable of supporting and guiding it, will be the work of years, perhaps even decades. There will be victories along the way, to be sure, and many opportunities for progress. But reconstructing a majority coalition capable of dominating the future in the way the old New Deal coalition dominated the past will be no easy task. It took conservatives a generation to rise from the rubble of 1964 into their present commanding position, and even now their grip on power is not entirely secure. Democrats cannot assume that they will rebuild themselves any more quickly. But the task is far from hopeless. In the meantime, there is the challenge of opposition -- the task of keeping alive an alternative vision of what America is and can be; of fighting honorably but doggedly against the most dangerous goals of the right; and of never, never giving up. </p>
<p><i>Alan Brinkley is provost and Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Mon, 22 Nov 2004 03:26:02 +0000144081 at http://prospect.orgAlan BrinkleyBased on a True Storyhttp://prospect.org/article/based-true-story
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <blockquote><p><b>My Life</b><br />By Bill Clinton • Knopf • 957 pages • $35.00</p></blockquote>
<p>Presidential memoirs are among the worst of all literary genres. That is not because they are invariably self-serving and less than wholly honest. Even the greatest memoirs are both. It is because they are relentlessly inauthentic. One can read the memoirs of virtually every postwar president without learning anything of importance about the men who wrote them, even in those relatively rare instances when the man was actually the former president himself. Instead, the reader confronts what is, in effect, an official state document, vetted by many hands, carefully edited to offend no one and to reveal nothing of importance, written with a lofty, statesmanlike dullness. Unsurprisingly, historians writing about recent presidents make little use of their memoirs, and readers wanting to learn about the men also steer a wide path around these books.</p>
<p>But a small number of presidential memoirs are of value to students of the presidency. Richard Nixon's autobiography, reviled at the time of its publication as a dishonest cover-up, is actually among the most revealing books about this complicated president -- a portrait suffused with the tortured resentment, cloying self-pity, subtle evasiveness, and genuine intelligence that formed much of the essence of the man. Likewise, Bill Clinton's new memoir reveals a great deal about this driven, complex, frustrating, but irresistible figure, who ranks alongside John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan as one of our most compelling modern presidents. </p>
<p><i>My Life</i> is a very long book, far longer than it needs to be. It is crammed with detail -- much of it needless -- about almost every aspect of Clinton's life, including portraits of countless people he has met and exhaustive, sometimes tedious discussions of the many policy issues that absorbed his attention as governor and president. Although often self-critical, it is also self-exculpatory. But whatever its flaws, this massive book has one indispensable virtue: It is authentically his. That is not just because Clinton wrote the book mostly himself (reportedly in longhand, on legal pads). It is also because he used the book to explain his career as he actually saw it, with all the sentimentality, anger, affection, frustration, pride, and at times relentless self-examination that make up his elusive character. Although parts of the book are dull, the memoir as a whole is a rewarding and revealing portrait of an endlessly fascinating man. Those who write histories of Clinton and his time -- as many people, of course, will do -- will find this memoir an essential starting point.</p>
<p>Although <i>My Life</i> may seem at first glance to be without clear structure or theme, three distinct stories thread their way through the narrative. One is the role of Clinton's early life in determining the mainsprings of his character. The second is his political career, as a candidate and as an elected official. And the third is the story of his encounters with the many scandals that bedeviled his public life, from its beginning to its official end (at least until now). Many people will read this book with an interest only in the last of these stories, but Clinton makes clear how inextricably intertwined they all are.</p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; font-weight: bold; color: darkred">Up From Trouble</span><br /><br />
Clinton's father, Roger Blythe, died in an automobile accident several months before Bill was born. His mother -- a gregarious, fun-loving woman who was seldom happier than when she was at the racetrack -- worked for years as an anesthesiologist (in a time before doctors monopolized the field) to support her son. She married a charming scoundrel, Roger Clinton, had a second son, and weathered two decades of her husband's wild swings between alcoholic abusiveness (he once fired a gun in her general direction during a fight) and penitent amends. Bill, who took his stepfather's name (perhaps as a way to prove his loyalty and affection), intervened to protect his mother more than once. Like many relatives of alcoholics, he learned to hide his family's problems and to disguise his own anguish behind a sunny, garrulous demeanor. Throughout his boyhood, he thrived on the affection he managed to elicit from friends, relatives, teachers, ministers -- anyone who might validate his effort to prove that he was different from the man he called “Daddy” but whom he never fully accepted as a father. Clinton put up with his stepfather and even felt real affection for him. But he adored his mother and was fiercely loyal to his brother, Roger Jr., who weathered the family wars far less successfully than Bill did and ultimately served time in prison for dealing drugs.</p>
<p>Clinton describes his younger self as something of an outsider, separated from others by the secrets of his family and by his self-image as a large and somewhat awkward boy. But he worked hard to be popular and successful, and by the time he was in high school, he had succeeded -- so much so that he began his political career as an energetic and ambitious member of Boys Nation (through which he won a trip to the White House and a now-famous photograph with Kennedy). He also developed enough confidence to dream of leaving Arkansas to attend Georgetown University in Washington, where he was not just a good student but a successful campus politician and an eager aide to his boyhood idol, Senator William Fulbright, whose recommendation helped him win a Rhodes Scholarship.</p>
<p>Clinton's account of his years at Oxford is entangled with his description of how he confronted the military draft, then at its Vietnam-era height. Anyone who recalls the 1992 New Hampshire primary will recall the charges and countercharges that swirled around Clinton's first presidential race and nearly destroyed it. Clinton carefully describes his own conflicted views -- his opposition to the war, his reluctance to risk his life for a cause he opposed, and his simultaneous doubts about the morality (and future political value) of his position. His anguished letters at the time to the National Guard commander who had offered him a position came back to haunt him two decades later, but he makes a persuasive case that his indecision and anguish were real. </p>
<p>The most important event of his youth was likely his encounter at Yale Law School with Hillary Rodham, whom he pursued for several years with a single-minded intensity that he usually reserved for politics. This is a familiar story, in part because Hillary Clinton tells it herself in her own memoirs. What is clear from these accounts is the deep attachment these two talented, ambitious young people developed -- an attachment deep enough to draw Bill away from career and politics to follow Hillary to California during one of their law-school summers; and one deep enough ultimately to persuade Hillary to follow Bill to Arkansas, giving up what would certainly have been a far more luminous career in law than she could hope to find in Little Rock. Whatever the difficulties this marriage and partnership faced over the years -- and there were clearly many -- neither of these remarkable people would have achieved alone what they have achieved together. </p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; font-weight: bold; color: darkred;">Turning to Politics</span><br />
Bill Clinton's electoral career -- which began with an unsuccessful race in Arkansas in 1974 for the U.S. Congress and ended with his becoming the first Democrat elected to a second term as president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- is a remarkable story. That Clinton began his public life in the mid-1970s, with the United States in the throes of its first serious economic difficulties since the Great Depression, profoundly shaped his outlook. That he began it in Arkansas, a poor state in which working people were paying a high price for the halting emergence of the new global economy, defined his politics as well. </p>
<p>Clinton sensed early how profoundly different the politics of the 1970s and '80s were from those of the heady, turbulent '60s. As a founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, he helped craft a strategy that he believed would permit the Democrats to recover from the loss of popular faith in postwar liberalism. He argued that the party must embrace the task of helping ordinary people weather economic change.</p>
<p>Out of this new political strategy came several important innovations. One was the emphasis on work -- on the value of work to both the community and the individual, and on the importance of making work an attractive alternative to welfare and crime. Another was the belief that in the new economy, only those with education could hope to succeed. Still another was the commitment to fiscal discipline, both as a rejoinder to the Democratic Party's spendthrift image and as a strategy for making the U.S. economy competitive in the world. </p>
<p>The most important policy innovations of Clinton's presidency -- some of them thwarted and some of them achieved -- were almost all directed toward the advancement of these goals. The politically costly tax increases of his first year in office were critical to the fiscal stability and booming economic growth that won him re-election in 1996. The failed health-care reform of 1994 was driven in large part by his understanding that employers struggling with the competitive economy of the late 20th century were finding it increasingly difficult to provide adequate benefits to workers. The Earned Income Tax Credit, one of the most effective anti-poverty policies of the last third of the 20th century, was an effort to create incentives for low-income people to work. The 1996 welfare reform -- crafted in large part by Republicans but reflecting principles Clinton had long supported -- was an effort to direct more public assistance toward working people.</p>
<p>Clinton spent most of his presidency in battle with a hostile Republican Congress, and his policy options were heavily restricted as a result. But he became a master of incremental change, using executive powers and what legislative leverage he had to inch public policy in the direction of the work- and education-based philosophy he had helped create. No one will confuse the Clinton years with the New Deal or the Great Society. But the policy achievements of the 1990s were considerable. </p>
<p>Clinton's description of his international policies is more fragmented and less compelling than his account of his domestic efforts. He came into office amid the ruins of old Cold War paradigms and took the foreign-policy helm without a compass. Not surprisingly, he often seemed rudderless, reacting to events as they occurred without framing a clear set of principles to guide him. But in fairness, no one else in those years was able to articulate a clear and compelling philosophy of international relations in a world no longer governed by competition among great powers. And as Clinton's successors try their hand at bringing coherence and “moral clarity” to America's role in the world, the pragmatic, nonideological policies of the 1990s look much better than they did at the time.</p>
<p> <span style="font-size: medium; font-weight: bold; color: darkred;">Survival</span><br />
“While I was hard at work on foreign affairs,” Clinton writes in his account of his first term, “the new world of Whitewater was beginning to take shape at home.” Some have found his description of the wave of scandals that almost destroyed him evasive and dishonest. But many readers will likely agree with Clinton that the degree of investigation and harassment that his administration faced was without precedent in American history, both in its intensity and in its longevity. Clinton offers several, sometimes conflicting explanations of his plight, and at times succumbs to a sullen bitterness that is out of place with the mainly positive, even sunny tone of most of the book. But at heart, his explanation rings true: Whitewater and subsequent investigations were, above all, the result of a political strategy crafted by the Republican Party and its allies on the right. They feared and resented Clinton because he was so skillfully repositioning the Democratic Party to occupy ground the Republicans believed was their own, and they calculated that he was far more vulnerable on personal than on political grounds. Clinton's own self-destructive behavior gave them an opportunity to move in for the kill, to be sure. But the assault was already far advanced and highly organized before anyone had ever heard of Monica Lewinsky.</p>
<p>It was certainly “vast” and certainly “right-wing” but hardly a “conspiracy.” Rarely has a campaign of political destruction been waged so openly and unashamedly -- and so effectively. That Clinton ultimately survived is testament to his own political skills and to the self-defeating excesses of his enemies. But no one could argue now that he truly won the battle. The Whitewater strategy helped limit Clinton's effectiveness. Perhaps most of all, it saddled Al Gore with unnecessary baggage without which he would almost certainly have won the 2000 election. Should we blame Clinton himself for giving the right the opportunity it was looking for? In part. But there can be no doubt that he paid a far higher price than any other president for tawdry personal behavior. </p>
<p>Clinton writes: “Although I would always regret what I had done wrong, I will go to my grave being proud of what I had fought for in the impeachment battle, my last great showdown with the forces I had opposed all of my life -- those who defended the old order of racial discrimination and segregation in the South and played on the insecurities and fears of the white working class in which I grew up; who had opposed the women's movement, the environmental movement, the gay-rights movement, and other efforts to expand our national community as assaults on the natural order; who believed that government should be run for the benefit of the powerful entrenched interests and favored tax cuts for the wealthy over health care and better education for children. ... I was glad that, by accident of history, I had had the good fortune to stand against this latest incarnation of the forces of reaction and division, and in favor of a more perfect union.” </p>
<p>Self-serving and melodramatic to be sure. But like most of this sprawling, ungainly, captivating book, and like the man who wrote it, mostly right. n</p>
<p><i>Alan Brinkley is provost and Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University.</i></p>
</div></div></div>Fri, 16 Jul 2004 06:31:46 +0000143667 at http://prospect.orgAlan BrinkleyLiberty, Community, and the National Ideahttp://prospect.org/article/liberty-community-and-national-idea
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+2">N</font>othing is so central to America's image of itself as the idea of individual liberty. It is, we believe, what spurred many of the first European settlers to leave their homelands and come to our shores. It drove the revolutionaries who broke with England and created a new nation. It shaped the Constitution and, above all, the Bill of Rights. And it has been, we claim, the defining characteristic of our democracy for more than two centuries. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">It is true, of course, that rights and freedoms have been central to our history and basic to our political and social system. But they have not been the only force shaping our public world. At least equally important, through most of American history, has been the idea of community. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In our present political world, there is considerable anxiety about how successfully the idea of community has survived in the twentieth century and considerable criticism of the preoccupation with rights that many critics claim has dominated (and distorted) both liberalism and conservatism in the postwar era. This is an old complaint. Americans have been lamenting the decline of community for centuries--since at least the seventeenth century, when Puritan clerics began delivering jeremiads lamenting the passing of the close-knit religious communities of the first years of English settlement. The laments about the decline of community today are less theological, but no less impassioned. Intellectual and popular discourse alike are filled with warnings that the core of our life as a nation is disappearing, that we will soon find ourselves bereft of the institutional and cultural underpinnings of a healthy society. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">A growing chorus of powerful voices has emerged in recent years--led by (among others) Michael Sandel, Robert Putnam, Alan Ehrenhalt, Michael Walzer, Benjamin Barber, Amitai Etzioni, along with a very large part of the political right--charging that the bonds of community in the United States are dangerously eroding; that the character of our civic life has changed in ways that often seem to accentuate individual, as opposed to community, loyalties; that we are in danger of becoming an atomized society unable to forge the social bonds capable of sustaining our shared life. Both liberalism and conservatism in our time, some communitarian critics claim, have often tended to elevate rights to so high a place in the lexicon of values that other, equally important, values have suffered. There is at least some truth in these claims. </font></p>
<p> </p>
<hr /><h3><font class="nonprinting">THE INDIVIDUALIST STRAIN</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">American liberalism for most of the past 50 years has at times seemed wedded to the idea that individual rights are paramount and that only in exceptional cases can a national or community interest override them. Michael Sandel, for example, argues that liberals insist on government remaining neutral on questions of values and morality--on it playing no role in defining a good life or a good society, because any such definition would likely favor one group's values over those of another. Citizens are autonomous--independent selves who must define their own values and goals. And government's role is to create the kind of society in which every individual can live, as much as possible, as he or she chooses. Sandel is correct, in theory at least, that liberalism in our time has at times seemed firmly wedded to the ideas of individual autonomy and unfettered personal choice, and that some liberals have celebrated their marriage to that concept by pointing to dark alternatives-to the dangers inherent in more collective social orders. Indeed, to some liberal intellectuals, the idea of community has not only seemed less important than individual rights, but even a potential threat to them. They have embraced an argument, made particularly clear more than 60 years ago by Reinhold Niebuhr in <i>Moral Man and Immoral Society</i>. "Individual men," Niebuhr wrote, </font></p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><p><font class="nonprinting">may be moral. . . . They are endowed by nature with a measure of sympathy and consideration for their kind. . . . Their rational faculty prompts them to a sense of justice. . . . But all these achievements are more difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups. In every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for self-transcendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others and therefore more unrestrained egotism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships.</font></p></blockquote>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In other words, Niebuhr (and some more recent liberals) claim that liberty, and even morality, reside most effectively within the autonomous individual; the more the individual becomes embedded within a group (a "crowd," a "mass"), the more endangered liberty and morality become. It is on the basis of this strain--an often powerful strain--within liberalism that the communitarian critique is founded. </font></p>
<hr size="1" /><center><font class="nonprinting"><a href="/subscribe/"><img alt="Subscribe to The American Prospect" border="0" src="/tapads/mini_subscribe.gif" /></a> </font></center><br /><hr size="1" /><p><font class="nonprinting">Much of American conservatism, despite its contempt for what liberals have done in the last half century, rests heavily on a similar set of beliefs. Many conservatives also attribute to liberty a value far higher than they attribute to any community or collective interest; they too see the collective as not just inferior to, but a threat to, personal freedom. Their definition of liberty rests much more heavily than the liberal definition on the idea of economic freedom: the commitment to an unregulated free market, the belief that economic freedom, as Friedrich Hayek wrote 50 years ago in <i>The Road to Serfdom</i>, is inseparable from all other notions of freedom because economic power "is the control of the means of all our ends." Where some liberals believe government must be neutral in its relationship to values, behavior, and social norms, many conservatives believe government must be neutral in terms of markets, economic institutions, and the distribution of personal wealth. Where some liberals fear the irrationality and immorality of the "mass," some conservatives fear the tyranny of the state. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">This regime of rights and freedoms--a regime supported, in different ways, by elements in both political parties and by some of the most powerful political philosophies of the last half century--has culminated, its critics charge, in our present political moment: in a raging popular discontent with the public world, in a sense among many of our people that they have lost control of their lives, in a growing despair about the future, and in a belief that the institutions that have guided us through most of our history have somehow spent themselves. The public world as we have known it in our time, many have come to believe, seems to lack the resources to answer that cry. Society yearns, they claim, for something more than rights and freedom--for a sense of community capable of giving individual lives meaning, for the civic life that forms the basis for the liberty we cherish. </font></p>
<p> </p>
<hr /><h3><font class="nonprinting">THE LIMITS OF COMMUNITARIANISM</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The communitarian critique, as eloquent and compelling as it seems in the context of our present, unhappy public life, has serious shortcomings--both as a description of politics as it is and as a prescription for politics as it should be. It is not wholly clear, first of all, that the bonds of civic life have in fact eroded as thoroughly as some critics charge. The supposed erosion of what communitarians (and many others) call "civil society" and what Robert Putnam has called "social capital" is almost impossible to document. Many traditional institutions of civic life have indeed weakened or vanished, but many new ones have emerged to replace them--a process that has been continuous in American society for two centuries. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Nor is it clear that either liberalism or conservatism in our time have been as wholly wedded to the idea of rights as the critics claim. There are, in fact, countless examples of the ways in which both liberals and conservatives have, in fact, offered definitions of the "good life" and the "moral society," definitions that go far beyond a simple endorsement of personal liberty. For liberals, a wide range of social policies--housing subsidies, highway building, environmental regulations, civil rights and affirmative action, public support for the arts, and others--do, in fact, express a vision of a "good life," even if it is one that critics of liberalism may find insufficiently ennobling. Many liberals have gone further and endorsed ideas of national service, cooperative workplace structures, and other explicitly communitarian goals. Conservatives, too, have proposed visions of community based on a prescriptive moral agenda that proposes a wide range of behavioral norms rooted in a normative (and often religious) concept of how individuals and families should live and behave. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">But the largest shortcoming of the communitarian argument is the way some of its advocates define community itself. Many (although certainly not all) contemporary communitarians consider community inseparable from localism. It is the neighborhood church, PTA, Little League, Boy Scout chapter, Elks Club, or (to use Robert Putnam's now famous example) bowling league that is the source of civic life. It is the local voluntary association--the sort of organization that Tocqueville argued was so characteristic of early nineteenth-century America--that makes it possible for individuals to embed themselves in a community. Some communitarians, to be sure, see a link between the local community and the nation. They see in local civic life a vehicle for creating habits of community interaction and social trust, out of which a larger political community can eventually emerge. But other communitarians--those on the right in particular--envision no such links. The threat to community, they claim, is not just excessive individualism; it is also excessive centralization. The "community" stands in opposition to the "nation" or the "government." It is a defense against impersonal bureaucracies, against the state, against the larger world. And as such, they claim, it is part of a tradition deeply embedded in American history. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">It is true, needless to say, that this localistic vision of community has deep roots in the American past--as the frequent evocations of Tocqueville by today's communitarians make clear. Historians, and others, have spent several decades now exploring the tradition of what they call republicanism, a vision of society that emerged in the eighteenth century and survived (according to some, although not all, of its chroniclers) through the nineteenth and into the twentieth (in the form of various populist movements, in some areas of the labor movement, in some parts of the left, and even in parts of the communitarian right). The republican tradition (closely associated with, among others, Thomas Jefferson) places a high value on personal liberty, to be sure, but it situates liberty within the fabric of a relatively small and homogeneous community whose citizens operate according to a shared moral code and a respect for social norms. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+2">W</font>hat gives rights and freedoms meaning? Many liberals and libertarians would argue that their meaning is inherent, that they are themselves the foundation of our public world. But republicans would argue differently. Liberty has no meaning except in a social context; rights cannot be sustained unless there is a civic life healthy enough to create a shared commitment to them. Communities create freedom; freedom does not create itself. But in order to create freedom, communities also create obligations--obligations to honor certain common values, to respect certain institutions, to accept some common definition of what is good. We cannot hope to be truly free, according to the tradition of republicanism, unless we identify with and share in the governance of the political community upon which our freedom depends. And we can only do so, many republicans have argued throughout American history, if the community remains small enough that individuals can realistically expect to exercise some power within it. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, in one of his last books, <i>The True and Only Heaven</i>, drew particular attention to today's close-knit, ethnically homogeneous, working-class communities as examples of healthy, vibrant societies. Lasch was deeply disheartened by the condition of modern middle-class life--by what he considered its heedless materialism, its resistance to social bonds, its rejection of obligation to family and neighborhood, its isolation of individuals into self-regarding, narcissistic beings. The strong Italian or Irish or Jewish or other ethnic neighborhoods of many American cities, with their strong family and community bonds, seemed to him a model for what the rest of society might become. And it is true that there is much to admire in the close and enduring ties of family and church and neighborhood, in the sense of mutual obligation, that characterize many such communities. A healthy society depends on strong families, vibrant neighborhoods, healthy schools, churches, and fraternal societies--thriving patterns of local, personal association. Those things are the foundations of community. Without them, the forces in modern society that isolate individuals would be impossible to withstand. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">But Lasch's example, although he never said so, also reveals the problem of basing our hopes for community entirely on local, family-centered, and neighborhood-centered structures. The United States is a vast nation of remarkable diversity, and its most difficult dilemma throughout its history has been finding a way for so many different kinds of people, and so many different kinds of communities, to live together peacefully and productively. That dilemma has become even more perplexing in the twentieth century, as a modern industrial economy and a pervasive mass culture have made it virtually impossible for any group to live in complete isolation. A purely local vision of community is, today at least, a prescription not for harmony, but for balkanization and conflict. The tight-knit ethnic communities Christopher Lasch celebrates may have many virtues, but they can also be, and have often been, places where bigotry flourishes and inter-racial violence often erupts. Other kinds of insular communities seem even more hostile to any notion of a stable, tolerant society: the gated, affluent communities that are now spreading across our landscape, based on an understandable fear of crime, to be sure, but an ominous sign of the fragmentation of our nation; the armed cults and militias, which have become visible to us only relatively recently, which set themselves up in opposition (at times violent opposition) to government and mainstream society; some, although by no means all, of the militant Christian communities, which attempt to impose a rigid religious orthodoxy on unwilling neighbors; and many others. </font></p>
<p> </p>
<hr /><h3><font class="nonprinting">BEYOND PAROCHIAL COMMUNITY</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">But there is also a larger vision of community, with equally strong roots in American history. The kind of community that forms the basis of a stable, healthy society--particularly a society as vast and diverse as ours--transcends parochialism. It rests at least as much on a concept of the nation as it does on the concept of the neighborhood, or the town, or the region. This idea of a national community is, in fact, among the oldest and most powerful in our history--at least as old and as powerful as the republican ideal with which it sometimes seems, at least, to compete. It is the source of our Constitution and the basis of the most powerful political traditions of the first century of our nation's existence. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The framers of the Constitution wanted, of course, to protect liberty. They wanted to create a form of government that would ensure the rights of the individual. But they understood, too, that liberty could only be secure in a large political community, a genuine nation. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia (according to James Madison's diaries), Alexander Hamilton "confessed that he was much discouraged by the amazing extent of the Country in expecting the desired blessings from any general sovereignty that could be substituted." How, he asked, could a national government effectively unite such a vast and diverse nation? Hamilton was expressing a widely shared fear, expressed most prominently by the French political theorist Montesquieu and widely understood throughout the English-speaking world. Popular government, Montesquieu warned, could not function within a large country; such a government would be torn apart by "a thousand private views" and would lead to efforts by ambitious leaders to produce despotism. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">But James Madison offered an answer to Hamilton and Montesquieu--an answer that Hamilton ultimately embraced and that became the heart of the American national idea. The size and diversity of the nation, Madison wrote in The Federalist No. 10, was in fact the best hope for stability. The greatest danger to a healthy society, Madison argued, was "faction": "a number of citizens . . . who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." How could a society avoid the plague of faction? There were two ways, Madison argued. One was "removing the causes of faction," a dangerous course because it would involve either destroying liberty or creating an enforced uniformity of views--both of which would be remedies "worse than the disease." The other was "controlling [the] effects" of faction. And to do that, he claimed, required a large political community in which every faction, no matter how large, would have to deal with, and accommodate, others. "A pure Democracy," Madison wrote, "by which I mean, a Society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the Government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction." The solution to faction lay in an extensive republic, spanning a vast and diverse country, where no one faction could prevail. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address (largely written by Hamilton), stressed the importance of a strong national union as the framework for a workable national community. The union was not simply a structure within which factions could do battle; nor was it simply a strong central government capable of tempering local passions; it was a state of mind--a commitment of citizens to each other and to a common sense of purpose and obligation, "an indissoluble community of interest as one nation." Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and the other founders of our nation had great respect for the small communities that bound the lives of most citizens. But they understood, too, that for America to survive and flourish, there had to be a larger idea of community as well, one that embraced the nation. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Their idea was not uncontested. Jefferson for a time offered a partial dissent, in his vision of a small agrarian republic united by the commonality of interest and sentiment of its citizens rather than by the power of a strong national political community; but Jefferson, as president, gradually moved away from his agrarian vision and presided over a significant increase in both the extent and the unity of the nation. A more serious challenge came in the mid-nineteenth century from the American South. "The very idea of an American People, as constituting a single community, is a mere chimera," John C. Calhoun once said. "Such a community never for a moment existed." The Civil War was, among other things, a battle to defeat Calhoun's idea. Daniel Webster based his famous defense of the Union on the idea that the survival of liberty depended on the survival of a national community--"Liberty and Union, one and inseparable, now and forever." There was, he insisted, a "common good" that transcended local interests, a partnership based in part on economic interest but also in part on spiritual union. One of the great admirers of Webster's words was Abraham Lincoln. </font></p>
<p> </p>
<hr /><h3><font class="nonprinting">COMMUNITY AND NATION</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The concept of a national community met a challenge again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the rise of large-scale industrial capitalism and the enormous social and economic dislocations that accompanied it. Laissez-faire capitalism--and such intellectual rationales for it as social Darwinism--celebrated individual initiative, the "survival of the fittest," and the value of acquisitive individualism as the basis of society. Everyone ultimately benefited from the achievements of talented, successful people, the social Darwinists claimed. Constraining their activities in the interests of the "community" would be to retard the healthy progress of society. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The populists offered one answer to laissez-faire. Economic growth that disempowered individuals and eroded communities was, they insisted, both unfair and unnecessary. The economy could grow and prosper in a more humane way, through a network of smaller-scale institutions rooted in communities; but it could also grow and prosper through the intervention of a powerful national government holding industrialists, financiers, and in the end everyone to a higher standard than maximizing profit. The local communities they were fighting to preserve could not survive, the populists believed, without a national community capable of restraining private power and protecting the interests of ordinary people. (The "populism" of our own time, which sees the only danger in society in a powerful national government, is a radical perversion of the original populist idea, which rested in part on the older republican notion of a "moral community" but that also embraced the more modern notion of a strong national government that defended individuals and communities from the great predatory organizations that had grown up to threaten them.) </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+2">A</font>nother response to laissez-faire came from progressive reformers, among them Theodore Roosevelt, a great champion of industrial growth and economic progress, but also a staunch defender of the idea of "the solidarity, the essential unity of our [national community]." Great forces had been unleashed in the modern world, Roosevelt recognized, forces that had enormous capacity to do good, to create progress. But that progress would be for naught if it came at the cost of the dignity of individuals and the vitality of communities. Individuals and localistic communities were powerless by themselves to withstand the assaults of modern, large-scale organizations. Only a national community--embodied, Roosevelt believed, in a vigorous democratic state--would make it possible for local communities, and the individual liberty dependent on them, to survive. "I believe in corporations," Roosevelt once said. "They are indispensable instruments of our modern civilization; but I believe that they should be so supervised and so regulated that they shall act for the interest of the community as a whole." The health of the nation depended on the "capacity to subordinate the interests of the individual to the interests of the community," and the realization of that capacity depended on national standards and national power. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The New Deal is remembered, and often excoriated, today as the source of contemporary liberalism, and its supposed preoccupation with rights and entitlements. And the New Deal did, of course, contribute in critical ways to the creation of the rights-based liberalism that has been so much in evidence in the last half century. But the New Deal was also deeply committed to the concept of community--both to the restoration of local communities and to the strengthening of the national community in which those smaller units are embedded. From the beginning of his administration, Franklin Roosevelt's rhetoric was suffused with images of nationhood, of interdependence, of community. In his first inaugural address, he never once used the words liberty, individual, or equality. The early New Deal was, above all else, an effort to find concepts of community capable of transcending the bitter struggles dividing groups in the economy and the society from one another. The New Deal's first major effort at economic reform, the National Recovery Administration, tried (although it ultimately failed) to create what New Dealers called "cooperative action among trade groups," to define a "community of interest" that would draw together capital, labor, government, and the consumer. It was an effort to temper the brutality of the industrial economy, to insist on national standards of "community interest" amid the brutal competitive struggle of capitalism. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Many of those impulses ultimately faded from New Deal thought, and others--which focused more intently on rights and entitlements--emerged to replace them, so that postwar liberalism had a weaker connection with the idea of community than most of the progressive and reform traditions that preceded it. Postwar conservatism, too, in its preoccupation with delegitimizing the New Deal and opposing communism, elevated the idea of liberty to a more central place than it had ever occupied before. The present popular discontent with the public world may or may not be a result of a real decline in community sentiment and community institutions. But that discontent has often taken the form of a lament for the passing of community and a yearning for its revival; and many of those who make such laments have found contemporary political discourse barren of language and ideas capable of satisfying them. The arguments of the communitarians of both the right and the left in recent years have emerged in response to that broad frustration. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+2">T</font>hese small chapters in the history of ideas of community in America, therefore, resonate with questions that preoccupy our own time. History teaches us, we hear from many quarters (including the halls of Congress and the bench of the Supreme Court), that a strong national community, and a powerful national government, are artificial accretions of modern liberalism, incompatible with our traditions and our values. But history teaches us no such thing. Our traditions and our values have never been fixed or uniform and they have always included--in addition to a strong commitment to individual rights and personal freedoms--a powerful sense of the value of community and the importance of nation. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The political world of today is preoccupied with divisions and oppositions: the government versus the market; the national versus the local; the public versus the private; liberty versus community. The rhetoric of our time asks us to choose among these conflicting values and ideas--to accept that we can have one but not the other. But the history of our nation's political traditions suggests that these divisions are entirely artificial, that it is unnecessary to choose. Indeed, not just unnecessary, but destructive. We need a vigorous government and a healthy market. We need strong national institutions and strong local ones. We need a healthy public world and a healthy private one. Above all, perhaps, we need--to paraphrase Webster--liberty and community; for neither is sustainable without the other. </font></p>
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</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:15:55 +0000141190 at http://prospect.orgAlan BrinkleyLiberalism's Third Crisishttp://prospect.org/article/liberalisms-third-crisis
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+2">T</font>his is a pivotal moment in our recent political history. The 1994 elections may or may not represent a lasting realignment of party loyalties. But even if they do not, they are clear evidence of something at least equally important. They reveal how massively government, politics, and the liberalism that has for decades largely shaped them have lost popular support, even popular legitimacy.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">With their longstanding assumptions about public life under siege, many liberals are in the throes of a crisis of confidence. Whatever forms liberalism takes as a result, they will almost certainly be different from those we have known. But as extraordinary as this moment may seem, it is not unprecedented.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">There are at least two examples in the twentieth century of a comparable (if perhaps less abrupt) collapse in popular confidence in a prevailing model of liberal politics and government, and of the creation of another model to replace it. Liberals searching for an answer to their present dilemmas might consider how earlier generations dealt with similar challenges.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">At the beginning of the twentieth century, American liberalism remained largely wedded to its Enlightenment roots. Liberals championed personal liberty, human progress, and the pursuit of rational self-interest by individuals as the basis of a free society (values most liberals would still claim to support) and stoutly resisted giving more than minimal authority to the state. This laissez-faire liberalism is often described today as "conservatism," but it was, in fact, a challenge to an earlier, nineteenth-century conservatism (often associated with the ideas of Edmund Burke and never strong in the United States) rooted in the protection of tradition and fixed social hierarchy. Laissez- faire liberalism envisioned a fluid, changing society, in which the state would not protect existing patterns of wealth and privilege and individuals could pursue their goals freely and advance according to their own achievements.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In practice, of course, the theory of laissez-faire liberalism bore little relationship to the realities of industrial society or political life in America. Like most of their contemporaries, liberals tolerated and even actively promoted what by modern standards would seem to be oppressive official restrictions on personal behavior. Ambitious entrepreneurs decried state interference in the name of liberalism when it constrained them, but they welcomed, even demanded, government assistance when it was of use to them. Nor were most liberal capitalists genuinely committed to an open competition for wealth and power. Business champions of laissez faire often benefited, for example, from government intervention that protected them against challenges from their own workers. But the "liberal" idea however inadequately it described social reality became a potent justification for a rapidly expanding capitalist world and for a notion of individual freedom that gained increasing sway within that world.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+2">B</font>y the beginning of the twentieth century, the chasm separating the character of industrial society and the liberal vision of it had become too glaring to ignore. A class of corporate titans was emerging with unprecedented wealth and power. Private institutions were attaining sizes never before imagined. The freedom of individuals to pursue their economic self-interest seemed imperiled by these new centers of authority; and many erstwhile champions of laissez faire came to believe that preserving a genuinely free society required somehow constraining the private power that now threatened to dominate it.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The result was the emergence of a new "progressive" or "reform" liberalism, with broad support from across the economic, regional, and political spectrum. It was committed to (among many other things) taming the excesses of industrialism and imposing a measure of social control on capitalism. Reformers set out to protect individuals, communities, and the government itself from excessive corporate power and (more haltingly) to provide citizens basic subsistence and dignity, usually through some form of government intervention. The New Deal emerged out of this tradition of "progressive" reform, attached the word "liberal" to it, and for several years won broad popular approval for its efforts to transform the character of government.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">But the New Deal model gradually generated a powerful reaction of its own from corporate forces that felt threatened by its policies, but most of all from ordinary people who began to fear the power of government as much as (if not more than) they had once feared the power of capitalists. Even at the height of Roosevelt's popularity, public opinion surveys (crude as they were in the 1930s) revealed a striking level of concern about public spending, the size of the government bureaucracy, and the burden of federal taxes (which for the middle class were extremely light by later standards). Popular movements emerged denouncing the "dictatorial" aspirations of the president and the "tyrannical" character of the new state bureaucracies. As the 1930s wore on and the New Deal failed to end the Clutch Plague, such attacks steadily grew. By the beginning of World War II, New Deal liberalism was already on the defensive.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+2">I</font>n 1942, finally, the Democratic Party suffered an electoral defeat that contemporaries considered nearly as disastrous as observers now consider the 1994 results. Democrats lost 50 seats in the House (which, when combined with substantial setbacks in 1938, reduced to 10 a majority that six years earlier had stood at 242) and 8 seats in the Senate (reducing their majority to 21 from the 60 they had enjoyed after the 1936 election). Given the power of southern Democrats, conservatives had effective control of the House and close to a majority in the Senate.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">"That the Administration has completely lost control over Congress in the November elections is becoming clearer every day," a British diplomat reported to London early in 1943. "The Republicans will of course have working control of Congress," the New Deal economist Eliot Janeway wrote after the election. "On every issue enough anti-Roosevelt Democrats will be with [the Republicans] to enable Congress to boss the Administration at the point of a gun. . . . The balance of [Roosevelt's] term is going to be an obstacle race." </font></p>
<hr size="1" /><center><font class="nonprinting"><a href="/subscribe/"><img alt="Subscribe to The American Prospect" border="0" src="/tapads/mini_subscribe.gif" /></a> </font></center><br /><hr size="1" /><p><font class="nonprinting">Over the next two years, congressional conservatives systematically dismantled substantial elements of the New Deal: the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, and virtually every other relief and public works program Roosevelt had created. They abolished the government's first and only planning agency, overturned the president's efforts to limit wartime salaries to $25,000 a year, passed legislation restricting labor's right to strike and contribute to political campaigns, and reduced funding for the Office of Price Administration and the Office of War Informa tion, war agencies conservatives considered centers of liberal sentiment.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The administration and its liberal allies had expected strained relations with Congress. But many were astonished by the intensity and bitterness of the opposition. Congress seemed to many liberals to have launched a frenzy of indiscriminate budget-cutting in an effort, as one New England Republican gloated, to "win the war from the New Deal." Vice President Henry Wallace spoke in 1943 of "powerful groups who hope to take advantage of the President's concentration on the war effort to destroy everything he has accomplished on the domestic front over the last ten years." James F. Byrnes, a former senator who had been at best moderately supportive of the New Deal in the 1930s, confided to Felix Frankfurter early in 1943 (by which time Byrnes was working in the White House) that he had been watching the performance of Congress with dismay. As Frankfurter recorded the conversation in his diary, Byrnes "never had such a sense of intellectual bankruptcy. He said there was not one thought or idea or bit of illumination in the whole outfit, and the only thing they talked about was that they were committed to abolishing bureaucracy.'"</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Early in 1944, the poet and Office of War Information administrator Archibald MacLeish told a gathering of politicians and journalists honoring Freda Kirchwey, editor of the <i>Nation</i>, "Liberals meet in Washington these days, if they can endure to meet at all, to discuss the tragic outlook for all liberal proposals, the collapse of all liberal leadership, and the inevitable defeat of all liberal aims. It is no longer feared, it is assumed, that the country is headed back to normalcy, that Harding is just around the corner."</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The political setbacks of the 1940s, and the changing political climate they represented, contributed to another redefinition of the liberal idea of the state. By the end of World War II, most liberals had begun to coalesce around a new prescription for government in which calls for structural reforms of capitalism or controls over the behavior of corporate leaders were no longer central. Postwar liberalism attempted, instead, to accommodate itself to the existing structure of American capitalism and to find new vehicles the manipulation of fiscal and monetary levers, as Keynes, among others, had urged by which the federal government could fight recessions and promote economic growth. Stimulating consumption, not regulating production, was the principal economic activity of postwar liberal government. "Full employment" was its goal. A generous welfare state would compensate for the inevitable shortcomings of the "free" economy and would contribute, as well, to the steady increase in purchasing power that the new vision of full employment required.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+2">I</font>nto this changing liberal world, a different political language gradually emerged to replace the now-repudiated interest in class and economic power that had dominated the New Deal. It was the language of individual rights a language the war, and the anti-totalitarian sentiment the war had produced, greatly strengthened. The rights-based liberalism of the post-New Deal era eventually helped lead many white liberals into a great if, for some, short-lived alliance with African Americans in the battle for civil rights and racial justice. It led in turn to the mobilization and empowerment of many other groups whose causes liberals generally embraced, among them racial and ethnic minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities. And it led as well to a growing level of tolerance for unconventional forms of personal behavior and morality a cultural relativism that has gradually become one of liberalism's most controversial and politically damaging characteristics.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">It is this newer model of liberalism a liberalism related to but substantially different from the New Deal that the electorate seems now to be repudiating. Its collapse is a result of the convergence of several major changes in the social and political landscape:</font></p>
<p> </p>
<ul><li><font class="nonprinting">Postwar liberalism has been closely identified with enhancing the role of the federal government. It has fallen victim in part to the widespread perception a greatly exaggerated but not entirely false perception that government itself has become as inefficient, corrupt, and menacing as earlier generations of reformers believed the corporate world had become. </font>
<p> </p>
</li>
<li><font class="nonprinting">Postwar liberalism has embraced the drives for expanded rights by individuals and groups. It has fallen victim to a growing popular fear of cultural disintegration and fragmentation, a belief that the liberal commitment to "rights" has somehow run amok at the expense of society's ability to preserve some elemental sense of community. </font>
<p> </p>
</li>
<li><font class="nonprinting">Postwar liberalism thrived in part on the basis of a vigorous Cold War internationalism, which not only legitimized an activist American foreign policy but also helped legitimize government itself. When the state could be seen as the defender of democracy against communism, when the president was the "leader of the free world," government had a claim to popular loyalty that it can now make with much less authority. </font>
<p> </p>
</li>
<li><font class="nonprinting">Most of all, postwar liberalism flourished on the basis of its promise that government could help sustain high levels of economic growth and security a promise government seemed to keep (even if not through the means most liberals expected) for a generation after World War II. Liberalism flounders today because of a twenty-year shift in the structure of the American economy. This shift, and the way in which the nation has adjusted to it, has weakened the popular support for, and perhaps also the viability of, the Keynesian fiscal policies on which liberals once relied to promote economic growth. It has also weakened political support for those economic tools, such as the minimum wage, that might have some effect on the increasingly unequal distribution of jobs and incomes. It is probably not too much to say that these economic frustrations, and the political world's inability to answer them, lie at the heart of liberalism's current crisis, and at the heart of the larger disillusionment with government and politics that has created that crisis. </font></li>
</ul><p> </p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+2">I</font>n the embittered and ungenerous climate of American public life today, creating a new liberal vision that is both humane and politically viable will be exceptionally difficult. Liberals have been trying to recast themselves and their ideas for a generation (an effort that has been particularly visible in recent years in the pages of this magazine), and they will no doubt continue to do so. But however difficult the task, the challenge facing liberals today is an urgent one and not unlike the challenge that faced progressives early in the twentieth century and New Dealers in the 1940s.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Recreating the New Deal, which was a far-from-perfect answer even to the problems of its own time, is certainly not the solution to liberalism's problems today. But some elements of the New Deal including some of those repudiated and largely forgotten after the wartime redefinition of the liberal state suggest some ways of thinking about the future of liberalism in our own time.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Among the forgotten initiatives of the New Deal was the most ambitious effort to reorganize the federal government ever undertaken by any modern administration. Roosevelt's "executive reorganization plan," the product of an extended study by a commission of distinguished scholars and planners, recommended sweeping changes in the structure of the federal government: reorganizing and relocating agencies and departments; weakening the autonomy of the civil service and the independent regulatory commissions; enhancing the budgetary and administrative capacities of the White House; creating a powerful planning mechanism within the executive branch; and others. The changes would contribute, Roosevelt said, to the "efficient and economical conduct of governmental operations."</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Powerful conservatives in Congress, warning of a presidential "dictatorship," greatly weakened these recommendations by the time they were enacted in 1939. But the results were by no means inconsequential. Partly as a result of the reforms, the federal government emerged from the war better equipped than it had been in the 1930s to manage its responsibilities effectively and to assume new ones.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The Clinton administration's underappreciated and underpromoted proposal for "reinventing government" is the first major effort since 1937 to launch a serious reappraisal of how government works and how it might be reorganized. That it has generated so little attention and support from progressives is a sign of the intellectual disarray that has helped discredit liberalism in our time. Liberals now need to make the case, in an inhospitable climate, that government is not intrinsically bad. They must show that it can and must play an ameliorative and progressive role in social and economic life. And they must demonstrate that the efforts of the right to disembowel government through the balanced-budget amendment, the attack on unfunded mandates, the supermajorities for tax increases, and other structural changes are dangerous to society's capacity to respond to social, economic, and international crises.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">But to make that case effectively, liberals must also argue with equal force for a reexamination of the way government performs its tasks. They cannot reflexively defend existing agencies and procedures just because conservatives are attacking them or just because the agencies' ostensible purposes are desirable. They must be able to demonstrate that institutions of government are capable of performing their functions effectively and, equally important, that they are capable of continually "reinventing" themselves in response to the changing world around them. In the 1990s, as in the late 1930s, a defense of government must be tightly linked to a commitment to critical thinking about government.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+2">B</font>uried within the confusing maze of New Deal experiments and agencies was a cluster of efforts that attempted to protect and strengthen not just individuals, but communities. The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Resettlement Administration, the Farm Security Administration, and others all experimented with ways of promoting cooperation, community spirit, and mutual responsibility, and even created model towns, communities, and camps that were designed around explicitly communitarian models. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Anyone who has read John Steinbeck's <i>Grapes of Wrath</i> (or seen John Ford's film version of the novel) may recall the wonder and delight with which the Joad family encountered a federally run camp for migrant workers a camp explicitly designed around a concept of community engagement and shared responsibility, in stark contrast to the grim, competitive environment surrounding it. The scene depicted reasonably accurately the real camps planned and managed by the New Deal's Farm Security Administration. Not all liberals of the 1930s were interested in such goals, certainly, but there was at least a faction within the New Dealers concerned with what today's political theorists would call "civic life" or (to use Robert Putnam's phrase) the creation of "social capital." (See Putnam, "The Prosperous Community: Social Capital and Public Life," <i>TAP</i>, Spring 1993, No. 13.)</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In the 1990s, the degradation of civic life the erosion of patterns of interaction capable of creating social bonds among substantial numbers of people is one of our society's most troubling phenomena. And while citizens express their concern about that degradation in many different ways, few are unaware of its costs. It robs individuals of the satisfaction of group activities and shared experiences, and it robs society of the means by which men and women of different backgrounds and perspectives can learn to understand and tolerate one another. It poses a challenge to postwar liberalism's almost exclusive preoccupation with individual rights and invites attention to the problem of creating the basis for a healthier shared life.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">There is, of course, a limit to what government can do to create genuine institutions and habits of community in American life. The New Deal experiments were themselves both modest and short lived. But it has surely been one of liberalism's failures to have allowed the language of community to become the almost exclusive property of the right. Political discourse at times seems to have become a stale debate between advocates of the market and advocates of the state, with all other realms of human experience floating irrelevantly in the background as "a thousand points of light."</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">It is, of course, possible to romanticize the institutions of "civic life." Neighborhoods, churches, schools, and voluntary associations are not only sources of healthy communal experiences. They can also be sources of bigotry and oppression, and government will always need to intervene at times to curb their excesses and injustices. But for liberal government to be credible to and valued by its citizens, it cannot seem uninterested in, or reflexively hostile to, the institutions that define the lives of many, perhaps most, Americans.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The unhappy example of some of the Community Action programs of the War on Poverty discouraged many liberals from pursuing public efforts to restore civic life. But the effort did not die entirely with the 1960s. It survived for more than twenty years in the persistent call from many liberals for a form of national service that would, they insisted, restore a sense of shared purpose to American life. President Clinton's small but promising national service program (explicitly linked in his recent State of the Union address to the idea of "civil life" and the need for the "common bonds of community") is a response to that call. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The effort to enhance community has survived in other ways as well. It has found expression recently in the controversial but at least partially successful efforts in Chicago to transfer authority over schools to local councils of parents and teachers; and even in the attempts to create councils of workers and managers within some industries. More such efforts are surely necessary for liberalism to regain respect and credibility among those who have repudiated it.</font></p>
<p> </p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+2">F</font>inally, and perhaps most important, the New Dealers viewed themselves and the world they were attempting to reshape in terms of wealth, power, and (although liberals did not often use the word) class. The most progressive New Dealers considered taming the excesses of unbridled capitalism and empowering economically weaker groups at the expense of stronger ones their most important tasks. They carefully avoided the ethnic and cultural issues they believed had done so much damage to the Democratic Party in the 1920s, and in doing so left themselves unable to confront many problems of racial injustice. But they did manage to make the distribution of wealth and power a subject worthy of political discussion and the basis of a broad coalition that sustained the Democratic Party for more than a generation.</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Unlike the New Dealers, many postwar liberals were willing and even eager to confront racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual discrimination. Their participation in the successful effort to dismantle the legal structure of segregation and the still-incomplete effort to eliminate other, less formal patterns of discrimination is one of liberalism's proudest achievements, despite the divisiveness it has created and the political costs it has imposed. But the growing commitment to rights seemed to crowd out of the liberal universe the language of class and power that was so crucial to the political success of the New Deal. Who today talks about the extraordinary and growing maldistribution of wealth in America? Why is it so difficult for liberals to articulate a critique of corporate power in an age of falling living standards and rising insecurity among workers? How has it happened that among all the powerful institutions in modern society, government has become the principal, often even the only, target of opprobrium among Americans angry and frustrated about their lack of control over their lives? </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Before liberals surrender to the calls for disabling the federal government and devolving authority to states and localities, they would do well to direct attention to the increasingly centralized institutions of private power that will survive that process. It was to counter the power of such institutions that "big government" emerged in the first place. To whom would they answer in a world of weak or nonexistent national authority?</font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Franklin Roosevelt spoke openly in his 1936 campaign about "economic royalists," "business and financial monopoly," "reckless banking," and "government by organized money." "I should like to have it said of my first administration," he said, "that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master." That is the lost language of contemporary American liberalism. We need it back. </font></p>
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</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:15:55 +0000141349 at http://prospect.orgAlan BrinkleyLiberals and Public Investment: Recovering a Lost Legacyhttp://prospect.org/article/liberals-and-public-investment-recovering-lost-legacy
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+3">T</font>he emerging debate over the efficacy of public investment-- a debate the Clinton administration seems certain to accelerate-- has a familiar ring to anyone acquainted with the history of the 1930s and 1940s. Among the staples of economic discourse then were warnings that the United States was suffering from what many called "economic maturity" (or, as the economist Alvin Hansen put it, "secular stagnation"): a fear that the American economy had lost much of its capacity for productive growth. The purpose of public policy, Hansen and others claimed, was to intervene in the private sector to promote an economic expansion that the private sector itself had proved incapable of creating. That intervention, many liberals argued, should take the form of federal investment in infrastructure and other public works--expanding the productive capacity of the nation's economy at strategic points so as to accelerate private-sector growth. Critics argued, as they do today, that such efforts were beyond the capacities of government or were doomed to fall victim to pork-barrel politics. But for a time, at least, advocates of public investment prevailed. Now as we contemplate a new experiment in public works, we should examine how and why public investment vanished from the liberal canon in the years after 1945. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The popular and scholarly reputation of the New Deal rests largely on a set of achievements that have little to do with public investment: the Social Security system, the Wagner Act, reform of the banking system and the financial markets, regulation of wages and hours, and other accomplishments that fit comfortably into the framework of the postwar liberal agenda. But an equally important legacy of the 1930s and World War II was a massive program of public investment that changed the face of much of America and laid the groundwork for much of the postwar economic growth. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">The commitment to public investment was not new to the Roosevelt administration--as New Dealers themselves were quick to point out in response to their critics. Throughout its history, the federal government had invested in roads, waterways, railroads, universities, and other public projects. It had built the Panama Canal. Even Herbert Hoover, whom New Dealers spent a generation demonizing as a hardened reactionary, had created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932, which included among its missions government investment in public works. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">But the New Deal went further than any previous administration in promoting public investment. It built the Tennessee Valley Authority, which remains the largest regional development project in American history. It spent billions constructing highways and bridges, building dams and other hydroelectric projects, creating irrigation systems and other water projects in California and the Southwest. Through the Rural Electrification Administration, it carried electrical power to millions of rural Americans. New Deal public investments provided important short-term stimuli to the depressed economy; they pumped billions of dollars into money-starved markets; and they created jobs for thousands of idle workers. But they had an even more important legacy. Federally financed infrastructure projects laid the groundwork for the postwar transformation of the American Southwest from an arid, slow-growth region into a booming "Sunbelt." They helped bring millions of rural Americans into the orbit of national culture and national markets. They created transportation and communication networks without which the postwar "economic miracle" would have been greatly impeded. </font></p>
<hr size="1" /><center><font class="nonprinting"><a href="/subscribe/"><img alt="Subscribe to The American Prospect" border="0" src="/tapads/mini_subscribe.gif" /></a> </font></center><br /><hr size="1" /><h3><font class="nonprinting">ARSENAL OF PLANNING</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">World War II continued, and greatly expanded, the government's commitment to public investment. It is a familiar story that the billions of dollars of wartime public spending finally ended the Depression and created something close to full employment. Less familiar, but perhaps equally important, is the way much of the public spending during World War II contributed to building productive resources and new technologies that would continue to spur economic growth long after the war itself ended. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">As America's involvement in World War II intensified, New Dealers and other liberals argued strenuously that the private sector could not be trusted to invest sufficiently or responsibly enough to meet the nation's war needs--and with some reason. American business had suffered for over a decade from what many industrialists considered excess plant capacity; expanding that capacity for the war would, they feared, saddle them with an even greater excess when the fighting was over. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">In the absence of sufficient private initiative, the federal government itself invested heavily in building new defense plants--much of it through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (which the New Deal had sustained and expanded) and through the Defense Plants Corporation (a subsidiary of the RFC). The government financed over 2,000 projects and spent more than $17 billion in the process, substantially more than the private sector invested during the war. By the end of 1945, government-financed plants accounted for 96 percent of all synthetic rubber production, 90 percent of magnesium, 71 percent of aircraft manufacturing, and 58 percent of aluminum. State capital was also important in expanding the capacity of the petroleum and chemical industries. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">One of the explanations of the persistence of the Clutch Plague (advanced by the economic historian Michael Bernstein and others) is that the 1929 recession had hit the economy at an unusually vulnerable moment. The traditional engines of economic growth--railroads, construction, and automobiles--had ceased to expand as rapidly as they had in the past; younger industries capable of driving growth in new directions--chemicals, plastics, aviation, petroleum, and others--were not yet strong enough to do so. The wartime public investments in these industries was, therefore, not just important in meeting current military needs; it was also crucial to positioning the American economy for its dramatic postwar expansion. Without it, the enormous domestic and international demand for industrial products after 1945 would have encountered an economy still several years away from being able to produce them. Postwar economic growth would likely have been slower and less stable. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">By almost any measure, then, the federal government's ventures in public investment of the 1930s and 1940s constituted a significant policy success. Those ventures helped end the Clutch Plague. They helped win the war. And they helped create critical productive resources that made possible postwar expansion in previously underdeveloped regions and industries. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">And yet this substantial economic achievement left an insubstantial political legacy. The concept of public investment emerged from the 1940s so weak that even liberals failed to advance it with any real vigor or consistency for more than 30 years. Today advocates of public investment seldom justify their proposals by pointing to previous successes in the United States. They prefer analogies to Germany and Japan, and they seldom note that even those nations' economic success is a result in part of American postwar public investments in Europe and Asia, investments inspired in part by the projects of the New Deal. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+3">W</font>hy did the successes of the New Deal and the war prove so ideologically ephemeral? Part of the answer lies in the way in which the government disposed of its property at the end of the war. Virtually all the federally funded plants were leased during the war to private corporations--a substantial proportion of them to such industrial giants as ALCOA, Standard Oil, and Du Pont. The argument over what to do with them once the war ended was resolved quickly, after a special commission on reconversion (chaired by Bernard Baruch and dominated by corporate figures) predictably recommended that the plants be turned over to the private sector. Most were sold to the original lessees (at bargain prices) within a few months of the end of the war. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Many liberals were outraged. Some argued that the government should retain ownership and use the plants to pressure private industry to behave responsibly in setting prices and wages. Many more objected to the uncontested ceding of public property to a few large corporations. The experience soured many of them on the possibilities of future public investment; they came to associate large capital projects with public subsidies to corporate monopolies and cartels. It would be better, many liberals came to believe, to use public spending in ways that would redound more directly to the benefit of the consumer. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">A second weakness in the legacy was that so much of the nation's public investment, both during and after the war, took the form of military (and later "defense") spending. Liberals were quick to see the many ways in which military spending was wasteful and unproductive and the ways it diverted resources from important civilian purposes. They were less willing to acknowledge that some military spending, at least, served as an investment in the nation's productive capacities. (The military itself seldom justified its programs on that basis either; the defense of national security was rationale enough.) A large portion of the nation's public investment was, in short, disguised in ways that left it without any autonomous popular legitimacy. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">But the greatest weakness in the legacy of public investment was the very rationale liberals used to justify it in the first place. For the rise of public investment as a major activity of the federal government coincided with an important, if never fully recognized, shift in the way liberals justified government intervention in the economy and the way they defined the problem this intervention was designed to solve. For some decades before the New Deal, and even during Roosevelt's first years, those who believed in an active state emphasized problems of production. Free-market capitalism, they claimed, could not be trusted to allocate productive resources wisely or equitably. Capitalists, left to their own devices, would form monopolies or cartels or would find other ways to avoid competition. The result would be a system of production that was both inefficient and unjust. The role of government, therefore, should be to compel the private sector to behave in ways that would avoid the problems associated with monopoly. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">By the early 1930s, "producerist" reformers had become even more convinced of the need for government intervention in the private sector. American capitalists, they argued, had responded to the Clutch Plague with efforts to retrench: to limit wages and production. The state, therefore, needed to promote policies to force expansion and growth. There were, of course, many different prescriptions for how government should do that. They ranged from vigorous antitrust efforts to state planning of investment and production, to public ownership of the means of production. But however vigorous the debate over the role of the state, the ultimate hope of most of those who engaged in it was to find a way for government to influence the way capitalist institutions behaved and the way the capitalist economy invested. Public investment was, of course, one way for government to achieve that goal. The idea of public investment was strongest, therefore, when it was linked in the 1930s and 1940s to a producer-oriented agenda, when public projects could be seen as a contribution not just to consumption but also to the nation's productive potential. </font></p>
<hr /><h3><font class="nonprinting">THE KEYNESIAN DETOUR</font></h3>
<p><font class="nonprinting">By the end of World War II, most liberals were coming to embrace a different concept of what the state should do, a concept described (but not wholly created) by Keynesian economic theory. The problems of production now seemed less pressing. The real challenge facing the economy, and hence facing a government committed to assisting the economy, was consumption. The Depression, most New Dealers had come to believe, had been a result of a lack of mass purchasing power. The solution to the Depression was a set of public policies that would increase that purchasing power and hence raise demand. The state should treat its citizens less as producers than as consumers. Some liberals continued to view capitalist leaders with mistrust and continued to press for antitrust or regulatory or planning efforts; but those policies were becoming increasingly secondary to the powerful new belief in using government fiscal policies to stimulate demand and create full employment. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">That view of the state was not incompatible with a belief in public investment. And, indeed, many defenders of public investment argued that its greatest value was in creating consumer demand--both by creating jobs in the short run and by expanding markets in the long run through regional development. Some Keynesians, among them John Kenneth Galbraith, continued through the 1950s and 1960s to insist that the best use of fiscal policy was to spend public funds on important public projects; that to do so would have the dual effect of stimulating economic growth and enhancing the nation's productive resources. But most Keynesians rejected Galbraith's notion. Public investment, they argued, worked too slowly to provide a significant economic stimulus in a recession. If increasing consumption was the ultimate goal of public policy, then the most effective way to achieve it was through lower taxes (the approach Walter Heller persuaded the Kennedy administration to adopt) or through public spending that would reach the hands of consumers much more quickly (an idea that helped sustain liberal efforts to enlarge programs of public assistance). Concern about the productive capacities of the American economy did not disappear, but it became so secondary to these newer, consumption-centered concerns that it had increasingly little impact on policy. Production, it seemed, could take care of itself. And for nearly 30 years after the end of World War II, it appeared to do so. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Public investment fell from favor for other reasons as well. The new, postwar liberal agenda was driven not only by a sense of what worked best in the abstract but also by a view of what was politically possible and ideologically appealing. On both counts, public investment suffered. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Public investment and Keynesianism were not incompatible; and had Keynesanism in postwar America assumed the social democratic form that Keynes himself had, at times, envisioned for it, public investment might have flourished. But American Keynesianism took a more conservative course than some of its original champions had expected or hoped and came to focus almost exclusively on using fiscal policy to stimulate demand. Largely lost in the process was the more "radical" Keynesian goal of using government spending to promote particular, socially valuable projects as well. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+3">T</font>he triumph of this relatively conservative "neo-Keynesianism" in the 1940s and 1950s was a testament to how rapidly the American political climate was changing as the New Deal faded into history. In particular, it was a testament to how much the war weakened certain liberal positions. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Throughout the war years, corporate leaders had increased their influence within the federal government through the war agencies they largely dominated. They had succeeded in portraying the production "miracles" of World War II as the achievement of the private sector, which heroically overcame the obstacles government structures placed in their way. The dismal reputation of the chaotic War Production Board, and the even more dismal reputation of its ineffectual chairman, Donald Nelson, obscured the important role state institutions (and state funding) had played in ensuring sufficient wartime production. This revival of business influence accelerated in the late years of the war and the first years of peace as the Republican party gained strength in (and, in 1946, control of) Congress, and as the new Truman administration began appointing economic advisers who were more conservative than their counterparts under Roosevelt. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Reinforcing this growing political bias against public investment was the ideological revulsion with which virtually all Americans--liberals and conservatives alike--responded to the fascist regimes the United States was fighting during the war. The results of the German and Italian experiments in creating "partnerships" between government and business persuaded many Americans that democratic societies must, as Reinhold Niebuhr once said, "walk warily" before embarking on any comparable statist experiments in the United States--including experiments in public investment (or, as the Germans sometimes called it, "state capitalism"). The ideology of the free market drew from the examples of Germany, Italy, Japan, and--later--the Soviet Union and emerged from the war with significant new strength. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">These political and ideological pressures reinforced the already strong inclination of liberals to pursue consumption-oriented economic policies, which were less politically controversial and less bureaucratically difficult. The turbulent atmosphere of the Clutch Plague had made direct state intervention in the market seem palatable, even necessary. In the more prosperous and conservative atmosphere of the postwar years, traditional inhibitions about government's capacity to act effectively as regulator or investor--and traditional fears about the dangers of its attempting to do so--quickly reasserted themselves, forcing liberal policy to adopt a relatively conservative Keynesianism less challenging to capitalist orthodoxy. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">An example of the changing political climate came in 1943, when the National Resource Planning Board--the only official "planning" agency in the history of the federal government--issued a report on the postwar economy. It called for, among other things, creating a "shelf" of public works projects from which the federal government could draw when economic conditions warranted. Such projects would be designed by nonpartisan experts and hence insulated from congressional politics. Public investment, the planners contended, could--and must--be a part of any program to create and sustain full employment; but for it to succeed, they believed, it must be at least partially insulated from politics (and from the image of corrupt, pork barrel politics). Congress found the NRPB report so distasteful that it abolished the agency a few months later. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">For the next 50 years, support for public investment languished--not just among conservatives, who had always scorned it, but among liberals, who were once its champions. There were notable exceptions, of course. The federal interstate highway program, the largest public infrastructure project in American history, attracted almost universal support in the 1950s and 1960s. But enthusiasm for building highways generated very little support for other public investment projects, which attracted ridicule and contempt as "pork," of value only to special interests, discrete regions, and their congressional representatives. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting"><font size="+3">T</font>he present woes of the American economy have begun to reveal the cost the United States has paid for allowing decisions about its productive resources to lodge so wholly in the private sector. For it is clear today that free-market capitalism does not, and perhaps cannot, alone create the preconditions for continuing economic growth. The private sector is not equipped to sustain and improve the nation's most basic infrastructure. It has not been effective in creating a trained and educated work force. It has not reliably generated the new technologies upon which advanced economies have come to depend. There are, in other words, critical tasks in which the state must play a significant role (as it has in the past), or they will remain undone. </font></p>
<p><font class="nonprinting">Those who believe in public investment, therefore, face a dual challenge. They must convince conservatives that the government is capable of acting effectively to improve the nation's productive capacity. But they must also work to redirect liberal thinking away from its almost exclusive preoccupation with consumption and toward a renewed concern as well with ensuring that America can produce goods efficiently and intelligently enough to survive in the changed economic world of the late twentieth century. </font></p>
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</div></div></div>Wed, 19 Dec 2001 18:48:05 +0000141487 at http://prospect.orgAlan BrinkleyThe National Purposehttp://prospect.org/article/national-purpose
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> </div></div></div>Wed, 17 Oct 2001 19:03:51 +0000142266 at http://prospect.orgAlan Brinkley